Just Because Cheerleading Is Hard Doesn't Mean It's a Sport [Sports]

Two, four, six, eight, to whom do we not allocate? Cheerleaders! At least, that's what the Second US Circuit Court has ruled in a case that pitted women's volleyball against competitive cheerleading. According to the ruling, although cheerleading is physically demanding, it doesn't qualify as a Title IX sport, and therefore a cheerleading team isn't a suitable replacement for another women's athletic team. As it should be. Replacing volleyball with competitive cheerleading as it exists today would be a huge step back for women's sports.

The girl jock-on-girl jock drama began in 2009, when Quinnipiac University announced that it was cutting its women's volleyball team and replacing the squad with a competitive cheerleading brigade (is that the proper terminology for of a group of cheerleaders? Let's say that it is). The volleyball team sued to preserve its existence, and in 2010, a federal judge ruled that under Title IX, cheerleading isn't a sport. The school, apparently dogged in its quest to be rid of the volleyball menace, appealed, and yesterday, the Second US Circuit Court handed down an almost identical ruling to the federal judge. Cheerleading isn't a sport, and cheerleaders aren't athletes — at least, not under the law.

While it may seem kind of head-scratching to call cheerleaders anything but "athletes" — their Aly Raisman-like tumbling passes and difficult pyramid maneuvers require training and can lead to the same sort of broken bones and torn ligaments one might suffer after a padless football practice — Title IX defines "sport" and "athlete" differently than a physical fitness test might. In order to be a Title IX "sport," the activity must have coaches, practices, competitions during a defined season, an organization that governs the sport and standardizes rules, and have competition as its primary goal. Competitive cheerleading is still, at its core, "cheerleading," and until very recently, it existed primarily as a way to rile the crowd up so they get good and excited to watch men's sports. Women's volleyball was never an activity that got the crowd going for men's volleyball. You can't win a gold medal in Olympic cheerleading.

The Second Circuit wrote in its ruling that while competitive cheerleading doesn't fit the definition of a Title IX sport yet, it may in the future. It just needs to work on having a defined season, getting more organized, and existing as a primarily competitive event rather than a warm-up act. And while a knee-jerk reaction to the ruling may be one of disappointment ("...but cheerleaders work HARD, y'all! It's like being a gymnast without mats who has to yell and smile and look pretty almost breaking her neck!"), if the Court had ruled that Quinnipiac was justified in replacing volleyball with cheerleading, what kind of a precedent would that have set? What other competitive sports would universities have wiped out in favor of promoting a sport that, for all its physical demands, still obliquely requires its female competitors look pretty in a traditionally feminine way?

[WSJ]

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Self-Conscious People Are Thoroughly Reviled Just for Being Self-Conscious, Which Doesn't Help Things [Paranoia]

In case you weren't awkward enough in the myriad of social situations you're violently tossed into throughout your daily routine, a new study from the London Business School into how people gossip about other people behind their backs will confirm all of your paranoid fantasies about your co-workers all conspiring to not invite you to Wednesday cookie cake night. Demonstrating a healthy, measured interest in what people are saying about you is fine, — advantageous, even — but if you're extremely self-conscious, your peers will think it's weird and talk about how weirdly self-conscious you are behind your back.

The study, which sports the pithy title "Do I want to know? How the motivation to acquire relationship-threatening information in groups contributes to paranoid thought, suspicion behavior and social rejection," figured out that nosy people really do lose their noses if they start fixating on what other people are saying about them. Lead researcher Jennifer Mason Carr and her colleagues found that, while gathering information reduces uncertainty and "gives people a greater sense of control and predictability over their environments," too zealous a search for information can be off-putting, prompting people who weren't gossiping about a colleague before to start gossiping about that person's obvious paranoia.

Researchers identified two types of information gatherers — "blunters," who avoid gathering information at all costs by putting their hands to their ears and humming "Flight of the Valkyries" at an unreasonable decibel, and "monitors," who root out information with the tenacity of pigs sniffing for truffles. Monitors are more likely, during their search for information about what other people are saying about them, to become paranoid and, as a result, incorrectly assess social situations. In bungling those social interactions, say the researchers, monitors often precipitate the very negative situations they're desperately trying to avoid. "Just like Oedipus!" exclaims Sigmund Freud, twirling a cigar from beyond the grave. The study authors explained that a monitor's paranoid thinking often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy:

Drawing from theories of motivated social cognition and symbolic interactionism, we hypothesize that this motivation is associated with paranoid thought patterns and suspicion behaviors that can anger other group members and lead them to reject those who actively search for evidence that others are secretly trying to harm them.

In order to figure out how MARTI ("motivation to acquire relationship threatening information") affects people, researchers told 102 study participants to perform a certain task, suggesting that some members of the group were doing a better job or were in a "more advantageous position than other members. The participants were then asked if they wanted to exclude certain people from their imaginary endeavor. Anyone who possessed high MARTI qualities was, on average, 3.63 times more likely to be excluded, because nobody wants to hang around a grouchy old group-member like Pierce Hawthorne, who spends all his time recording conversations and thinking of ways to outsmart the very people whom he purportedly cooperates with.

If You Think Your Coworkers Are Talking About You, They Probably Are [Business Insider]

Image via Blaj Gabriel/Shutterstock.

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Germany's Family Minister Doesn't Think Marissa Mayer Is Taking Enough Maternity Leave, Just FYI [Running In Heels]

When Yahoo! invited the perilously pregnant Marissa Mayer to captain its rudderless, waterlogged ship (hooray for nautical metaphors!), everybody collectively scrunched their brows and wondered why Mayer would want to give up a sweet Google gig to get in a time machine and go run 1999's search engine. Actually, what pundits, analysts, and soothsayers really wanted to know was how she was going to get Yahoo! back on track (yay for locomotive metaphors!) while simultaneously raising a baby. Much patronizing ensued, but now Mayer is facing criticism for her decision to "work through" her maternity leave from an altogether different observer — German Family Minister Kristina Schröder.

According to Spiegel, parents in Germany can take up to three years off to raise their kids and still have their jobs guaranteed, and, once they're no longer receiving paid time from their employer, the government will pay them commensurate with their previous salary for up to 14 months. Schröder, who's a member of Angela Merkel's cabinet with the conservative Christian Democratic Union party, is pushing for German mothers to take even more maternity leave, and thinks that a high-profile businesswoman such Marissa Mayer isn't doing working women any favors by assuring everyone she'll be working through most of her maternity leave. Says Schröder,

I respect this personal step being taken by Ms. Mayer. But I regard it with major concern when prominent women give the public impression that maternity leave is something that is not important. Maternity leave is absolutely important and not just from a medical point of view.

It would seem that Schröder has tapped into a new wellspring of Marissa Mayer criticism, that is, of course, until one realizes that the Family Minister cut her own maternity leave time short after she gave birth in June 2011. Schröder took just 10 weeks off instead of the mandated — mandated! — 14, and some people criticized her then for not taking more time. She defended that position, however, by calmly explaining that every mother's experience is different:

I was never of the opinion that a family minister should set the example for the country. Besides, the issue isn't such a big deal — I'm not, after all, the first woman to have a child.

Not the first, last or even 47th — it happens all the time, and women deal with childbirth in all different ways. Given the (subsidized) opportunity, sure, taking time off to raise an newborn is important to a lot of people (not just moms, btw), but everyone's priorities are different. Schröder does have a point that Mayer's reassurances of continuous work could negatively affect people's perceptions about paid maternity leave, but Mayer has her own agenda, which right now is intimately entwined with the anxiety of her new company's shareholders, whom she must convince that her company is capable of crawling out of the internet woodshed. However, even without that pressing need, a working parent should be allowed to take as much — or as little — time off as he or she needs because we are all snowflakes and the world is a stovetop.

German Family Minister Slams Yahoo! CEO Mayer [Spiegel]

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Urban Outfitters Really Doesn't Want You to Know About Its Bed Bug Problem [Urban Outfitters]

Want a free bed bug with your Urban Outfitters Navajo panties? Probably not. But if you shop at one Urban Outfitters in downtown Manhattan, you might not have a choice; the store has been dealing with the parasitic insects for months and refuses to take the issue seriously, even though two employees have confirmed cases of bed bugs in their homes and around a dozen associates have reported telltale bites since the first insect intruder was spotted by a customer in March. Experts say it would only take a few hours to correctly treat the entire store overnight. Why hasn't that happened yet?

A store representative told us that they could "neither confirm or deny" whether they had bed bugs in the store, but we've seen multiple memos confirming that employees of Urban Outfitters' Flatiron District location have been asking higher-ups to do something about the store's bed bugs for months.

In March, a customer found a bed bug on the sales floor. After that, Urban Outfitters called in an extermination company, but the company's canine inspectors couldn't detect any live bed bugs on the scene. In April, an associate reported a confirmed bed bug outbreak at home but the store didn't take any preventative action, even though all employees share a break room and locker space for their belongings. The next month — and into June and July — numerous employees started getting painful, itchy bug bites while in the offices, break area, and on the sales floor where customers buy their embellished goddess headwraps. Most of the bites appeared three in a row, as bed bug bites often do.

"As soon as it started getting hotter, everyone started getting bites, probably because everyone shares one communal office: bags, coats, everything goes in there," said our source. "Employees told their supervisors they were getting bitten and asked what they should do. But they haven't really done much."

Memos show that the same exterminators returned to the store on July 9th. After detecting bed bugs, they used cedar oil (an all-natural option that only works if you get it on the actual insect) to treat the lockers, break area, office, "perimeter and crack & crevices," but they did not treat any public areas of the store. When the extermination company returned on the 19th, dogs still detected bugs in two of the store's offices. But instead of taking instant action, managers threw away some old furniture and told employees not to keep their bags in the office.

We asked Arnold Caspro, a specialist at Ecology Ep, what Urban Outfitters could do to get rid of the bed bugs once and for all. He said the problem was likely that the exterminators hadn't found the main source of the problem — perhaps because some cracks and crevices hadn't been sealed — and that the store should've closed down for a night to steam all its clothing and treat all common spaces long ago. It would only take a night of work to treat a store of this size, he said — meaning Urban Outfitters wouldn't have to lose a day of business.

"It's very likely that the employees are transferring bed bugs to each other," he said. When we told him that dozens of employees work in the two-level store, he said, "Oh God."

A supervisor did say they were considering a night time extermination in a memo last week, but why have they waited so long to set that up? Until they deal with the situation in a more serious manner, any staffer — or customer — could carry the bugs home with their pre-ripped short shorts and "tribal"-print leggings.

After a number of New York City stores experienced infestations in 2010, a survey found that 40 percent of bed bug problems occur in commercial businesses. That year, Soho's Hollister outpost, an Abercrombie & Fitch store in South Street Seaport, and an uptown Victoria's Secret closed their doors for fumigation purposes after issues with bed bugs. When the latter took action after just one bed bug sighting, the store released a statement saying, "As a proactive measure, we tested our Manhattan stores. When we found small, isolated areas that may have been impacted, we immediately took action to resolve the situation." An excellent call, given as most fashion retail customers try on multiple articles of clothing whenever they visit a store. Why isn't Urban Outfitters more concerned?

"It shouldn't be up to the employees to fix this problem," our tipster said. "I hope [this] gets this store the publicity it deserves and ultimately (and most importantly) a safe work space for Urban's employees." And its customers, too.

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